Who's Perfect Anyway?

When I read my post from yesterday about learning from parents who do things well, I realized that this could infer that there are parents out there who live up to the image in our heads of the perfect parent.  If they are out there I have not met them in my 17 years of being a parent.  Unfortunately, they do exist in my head sometimes and can haunt me when I am feeling particularly incompetent.

I try to use models of others who I  imagine would do things "better" than me to help me change the way I am currently looking at a problem in my family.  How would my good friend J. handle this with their kid? Even if they don't handle things better in reality, my imagination can help me come up with some pretty useful solutions or approaches.  I can live into a better way of  parenting this way, without pressuring myself to be someone I am not.  And isn't that what we want for our kids as well?  That they be their own persons, learning from others they admire but remaining true to who they are?

As Kahlil Gibran suggests our children are   "the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself".  They have their own inner desires, thoughts, feelings and dreams.  Our notions of raising them perfectly or without making many mistakes along the way presumes, in part, that they are just like us, or should be...but as Gibran further says in The Prophet:

"You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you"